Acupuncturists should have clinical competency, including knowledge, skill and humanity, such as attitude.
In acupuncture and moxibustion educational institutions, educational objectives and strategies have been established to develop competency as a therapist. Therefore, an evaluation was performed in order to confirm the achievement of the learners, and whether the established initial objectives and strategies were appropriate or not.
As a matter of course, the National Examination for Acupuncture and Moxibustion Therapists is an evaluation standard which assesses the social competency oftherapists completing the educational course, namely they must have significance.
However, the current National Examination can only estimate the aspect of knowledge. Each educational in-stitution should, therefore, responsibly evaluate other acupuncturists' competency including skills and attitudes toward their competency insociety.
In the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), an adequate method to evaluate clinicians has widely been introduced for medical education.
The OSCE was introduced to educational circles of acupuncture in Japan because OSCE can evaluate competency; i.e. the psychomotor and affective domain, that is difficult to measure using a paper test.
Various difficulties still remain using OSCE for the education of acupuncture students in the view of both its adequacy and objectivity.
In the present paper, the actual condition and difficulty in using OSCE in education of acupuncture students are reviewed based on the reports presented atthe educational session of the conference.

This study was conducted to clarify the validity and availability of inclination of exponential curve-fitting model for oxygen uptake (VO₂) and heart rate (HR) during incremental exercise (I-ECOH) as an index of cardio-pulmonary functional reserve in patients with ischemic heart disease (IHD). A treadmill exercise test was used to measure the VO₂(L/kg/min) and HR (beat/min) during incremental exercise of all subjects. I-ECOH was derived from the following equation : HR=A·exp^B·VO2. The constant "B" represents I-ECOH. The following two identifications were made : 1) the relation between peak oxygen uptake (VO₂peak) and I-ECOH in IHD patients with normal left ventricular function and with chronic heart failure (CHF); 2) the relation between I-ECOH and the New York Heart Association (NYHA) functional classification of IHD patients with CHF.There were significant differences among IHD patients with normal left ventricular function, CHF patients, normal controls and long distance runners in I-ECOH and VO2peak, respectively (p<0.001). There were inverse correlations between I-ECOH and VO2peak in IHD patients with normal left ventricular function (r=-0.64, p<0.001) and CHF (r=-0.63, p<0.001). I-ECOH could be used to discriminate effectively between NYHA functional classes (p<0.001).In conclusion, these results suggest that I-ECOH is adequate and useful as an index of cardio-pulmonary functional reserve in patients with ischemic heart disease.

We did a retrospective review of 83 femoropopliteal bypasses with grafting of saphenous vein performed for two groups of limbs: those with arteriosclerosis obliterans (n=71) and thromboangiitis obliterans (n=12) over the past 15 years. The purpose of the study is to assess factors that influence long-term graft patency. We also examined methods used for reoperation. After a mean follow-up of 35 months (ranges, 1-164), the cumulative patency rate was 79% at 5 years and again 79% at 8 years, which was better than the patency of PTFE grafts or other prosthetics reported by other authors. The two groups were compared for the severity of ischemia, condition of the outflow tract, and whether anastomosis was above or below the knee. These factors were different between the two groups, but the difference in patency was statistically not significant. Two reoperations for claudication were needed. One was carried out with use of the bilateral saphenous veins from below the portions used earlier. The other was done for obstruction of a PTFE graft; anastomosis was done at the mid portion with the use of Vitagraft.